Columbo: A Study in Gestures as Characterization

Introduction Gestures can say a great deal about a character in a piece of media, but rarely is it mentioned in the analysis of that media, unless the people analyzing it specialize in that field. Columbo is an inverted cozy mystery cop show where Columbo, an LAPD homicide detective (played by Peter Falk), solves murders, with victims and murderers being wealthy and educated. Part of what makes Columbo unique is the inverted mystery, where the show starts off with a seemingly perfect murder being played out, and then the audience gets to watch Columbo pull it apart, knowing who the killer is. The other unique thing about Columbo is the character himself. He is extremely polite, tries to make himself unintimidating, and has a variety of quirks such as a right eye squint, having hard-boiled eggs in his pocket, and having large and elaborate gestures.

In this paper, I look at Columbo’s gestures over time, looking at a specific repeated phrase and a random stratified sample of episodes to study how he interacts with the people around him, and specifically, how he points. I look at his interactions with murderers and innocent people involved with the case, along with abstract pointing and the targets of his points (McNeil 2003).

Recording The original analysis is based on a youtube video compilation of all instances of Columbo saying his signature catchphrase “Just one more thing.” These were taken from the pilot in 1965 to season 8, filmed in 1989. Then I streamed the sampled episodes on a streaming service that I had, combined with youtube clips uploaded by the Columbo channel for specific gesture reference. Almost all of these episodes were filmed majority on a soundstage with the show being filmed from various angles, in the beginning doing experimental cinematography (Koenig 2021). For much of the show, Columbo is framed properly so that the full body can be seen without obstruction or gestures going off-screen (Seyfeddinipurr 2012).

Coding I transcribed the audio with a custom tier in ELAN, I chose to mark gesture phrases instead of gesture phases due to the fact that the clips within the video are so short and you don’t always see the entire gesture unit. I then annotated all the gestures based on the framework of gesture phrases, hand orientation, hand position, movement type, and speech intonation based on Bressems framework of annotation (Bressem 2013). For the gesture position on the body, I based it on Bressem’s figure of gesture space (Bressem 2013), but had to make adjustments to it due to Columbo’s constant poor posture and his tendency to make himself look smaller. I ended up lowering overall where the boundaries were for the center and periphery, and lowering the boundary that is considered upper (Figure 1). I considered the boundaries as follows: Lower: going past his the bottom of his coat pocket and below. Center: where he typically rests his hands, towards the bottom of his tie. (Figure 3) Upper: Right above his elbows, where he would have to bend or extend his whole arm to make a gesture. (Figure 2) Also for my comparison, I identified the scene that the clip was taken from (using the Columbophile site, and the r/Columbo subreddit), including a year, season, episode number, and summary of the episode (using IMDB). I also marked who Columbo was speaking to, and the relationship to the murderer of the episode. Then I marked what I believed the gesture meant within the context of the episode for every gesture that appeared.

Results The data suggests several things, out of all of the clips that I looked at, Columbo pointed most in episodes that aired in 1974 (Chart 1), out of all targets studied, he points mainly to people and ideas (Chart 2), with interactions of innocent versus murderers and type of pointing, the most frequent type of pointing was indirect points (not pointing directly at the person spoken to), to murderers. There is also a connection between the amount of pointing and whether or not the character (or actor) liked the person. The two major extremes on the chart are from “Any Old Port in the Storm” (the lower extreme) and “Exercise in Fatality” (the higher extreme). It was also found that Columbo gestures almost twice as much with his right hand than his left (32 versus 56).

Discussion Columbo’s gestures are very important to his characterization, specifically, he can use his gestures to build drama and show his opinion of another character. One example of this would be in the two extremes on Chart 4, in “Any Old Port in the Storm”, the actor Peter Falk became close friends with the actor playing the murderer (Koenig 2021), and the murderer was sympathetic and very friendly with Columbo, which Columbo then returned. There were several open-handed gestures, but rarely any pointing, even when confronting the murderer with how he did it. In “Exercise in Fatality” on the other hand, the murderer is rude, and is one of the rare episodes where Columbo gets actively angry at the murderer, and has almost 80 points in it, several of which are at the murderer. Since pointing directly at people now, and at the time is considered rude, I feel like this is very intentional action on the part of Peter Falk to emphasize the dropping of Columbo’s typical politeness for harshness.

Another thing that was found was that there were rare times where there would be significantly more pointing even though Columbo liked the murderer, or the murderer was sympathetic. With the example of “Playback” (1975), there are 67 points, which is higher than the average 30.46, when investigated, I found that the actor playing the murderer was a problem on set (Koenig 2021, Raimund Fritz 2014). I believe that in these situations, Peter Falk’s frustration with the actors around him is leaking into his scenes, even when trying to hide it.

Although not reflected in the charts, another interesting thing was Columbo holding his gestural hand shape for far longer than is usually seen. Typically when people do multiple gestures, they change their hand form to reflect the new gesture, but Columbo will hold that first gesture hand shape for 2 to 3 gestures before changing, even holding that hand shape in rest positions. As Peter Falk was known to be very detail-oriented and thoughtful about his character (Koneig 2021, Columbophile 2022), this was probably very intentional, and was to build on Columbo’s constant slowness and ease, not only was were his words and speeches slow and meandering, but his gestures were as well.

It is important to note the limitations of this study. One of the largest is that I did not look at every episode of Columbo, and so cannot make complete comparisons of the series. Another may be that during my sampling, I was watching the episodes and tallying, and there is a high chance that I may have missed points or a piece of the scene due to being distracted. This may skew the data somewhat, as I could have focused more heavily on episodes than others. The structure of the study also does not account for writers suggestions, character development of Columbo over time, and changes in stations and producers. A different study focusing on both these factors along with the current factors could produce a more nuanced study.

Regardless of the drawbacks, this study shows that Columbo’s gestures are very important to his characterization, and are very likely to be intentionally done by the actor who is playing the character.